Each repetition provides more information to inform the next one, making it a feedback loop. Step one is to observe the situation with the aim of building the most accurate and comprehensive picture of it possible. Information alone is insufficient. The observation stage requires converting information into an overall picture with overarching meaning that places it in context. A particularly vital skill is the capacity to identify which information is just noise and irrelevant for the current decision.
If you want to make good decisions, you need to master the art of observing your environment. For a fighter pilot, that involves factors like the weather conditions and what their opponent is doing. In your workplace, that might include factors like regulations, available resources, relationships with other people, and your current state of mind. To give an example, consider a doctor meeting with a patient in the emergency room for the first time to identify how to treat them.
Their first priority is figuring out what information they need to collect, then collecting it. In some cases, the absence rather than presence of certain cues is also important. At the same time, a doctor needs to discard irrelevant information, then put all the pieces together before they can treat the patient. To orient yourself is to recognize any barriers that might interfere with the other parts of the OODA Loop.
Orientation means connecting yourself with reality and seeing the world as it really is, as free as possible from the influence of cognitive biases and shortcuts. You can give yourself an edge over the competition by making sure you always orient before making a decision, instead of just jumping in.
Boyd maintained that properly orienting yourself can be enough to overcome an initial disadvantage, such as fewer resources or less information, to outsmart an opponent. He identified the following four main barriers that impede our view of objective information:. In one talk, Boyd employed a brilliant metaphor for developing a latticework of mental models.
He compared it to building a snowmobile, a vehicle comprising elements of several different devices, such as the caterpillar treads of a tank, skis, the outboard motor of a boat, and the handlebars of a bike. But combined they create a functional vehicle. As Boyd put it:. A loser is someone individual or group who cannot build snowmobiles when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change; whereas a winner is someone individual or group who can build snowmobiles, and employ them in an appropriate fashion, when facing uncertainty and unpredictable change.
To orient yourself, you have to build a metaphorical snowmobile by combining practical concepts from different disciplines. For more on mental models, we literally wrote the book on them. Information is analyzed, evaluated, and prioritized. The fundamentals of the situation — threats, opportunities, competitors, partners, all are sized up and duly appraised. From raw data to actionable insight, decision-makers should now be well-positioned to decide on the appropriate response.
Ultimately, this step of the process is about choosing from among a great many options. Each option will be informed by the foothold established in the orientation phase, but this is the forward-looking part of the equation.
Given the present variables that have been established, which course of action will deliver the most optimal outcome? Invariably, this phase produces a hypothesis: the decision-maker predicts what the best course of action will be based on his understanding of the situation.
This step is about testing the hypothesis generated in the decision phase. Because the OODA loop is, after all, a loop, action is never the last step of the process. What is learned about the validity of the hypothesis is repurposed throughout the entirety of the next cycle of the OODA loop. Ideally, future cycles will be both more accurate and faster. Human reaction time is defined as the time elapsing between the onset of a stimulus and the onset of a response to that stimulus.
For instance you might hear a gunshot and not see the person who fired it. Once you look and see the source of the gunfire you are now in the Orient stage of the process. In the Orient stage you are now focusing your attention on what you have just observed.
The next step is the Decide step in which you have to make a decision on what to do about what you have just observed and focused your attention on.
Finally you have made your decision and the last step is to Act upon that decision. Keep in mind that the O. A loop is what happens between the onset of a stimulus and the onset of a reaction to that stimulus. How fast is your O. Well, that depends on several factors that can affect your reaction time.
Simple Reaction Time is generally accepted to be around milliseconds Laming Napoleon was the greatest general that Europe had seen in centuries. He was the first general since Genghis Khan who stood a legitimate chance at sweeping every European nation under his banner. Because of his success, his style dramatically altered the way war was fought for the next century and a half.
Maneuver warfare was defined by characteristics like swiftness of action, cycles of dispersion and concentration, deception, surprise, fluidity, shock and flexibility. The other defining feature of maneuver warfare was that it tried to avoid actual war. Sun Tzu emphasized the moral and mental dimensions of war, the winning of hearts and minds. When fighting was necessary, he emphasized maneuver warfare characterized by quickness, variety, surprise, and harmony.
By the end of his campaigns though, he transitioned to a more rigid, uniform style that came to be known as attrition warfare. Instead of letting his troops move flexibly based on the situation in their part of the battlefield, he had them move uniformly in dense infantry columns, much like the British red coats. Because Napoleon was such a force of nature, the militaries of the world became locked into the view of Attrition Warfare as superior.
The American Civil War was characterized by large lines moving steadily towards and away from each other. During the First World War, Englishman Frederick Lanchester calculated that of the two, force size was more influential. The other variable, firepower, could offset this, but the weapons had to be MUCH more powerful to make up for the differences. Before the Second World War, German generals had gone back and studied earlier military strategists and designed the.
Yet, because the Germans committed such horrible atrocities, very few military theorists went back to study the Blitzkrieg. In the early years of the Cold War, American Generals were still locked into the attrition mindset that had begun with Napoleon. American generals believed they needed to have radically more powerful weapons in order to maintain parity with the Soviets. This all started to change with an insight John Boyd had as a fighter pilot in the Korean War.
In the leadup to the Vietnam War, the Air Force and Navy had developed bigger, more powerful aircraft than any that the Soviets had. Yet they were ten times less effective. The air-to-air combat kill ratio of in Vietnam was far worse than the they had achieved in Korea.
On the ground, the North Vietnamese employed the tactics of maneuver warfare at every level from strategic to tactical and ground warfare to air combat. They embraced the philosophy of Genghis Khan and Sun Tzu.
In the words of the legendary. To the chagrin of the Air Force Generals who had commissioned the bigger, more expensive planes, E-M theory showed conclusively that the lighter, cheaper, faster Soviet MiGs were more effective aircraft because of their quickness and maneuverability.
Vietnam marked the greatest inflection point in warfare since Napoleon. Today, insurgent groups around the world are using the strategies of maneuver warfare: surprise, variety, quickness and harmony to win. A prescient article for the Journal of Foreign Affairs, explained the future of warfare this way:. So far, the 21st century has borne out the prediction. Insurgents in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are not waking up to battlefield in straight lines.
They are attacking in an unpredictable pattern all over the world from the world Trade Center to Nice, France to London music venues to hotels in India. He developed a briefing called Patterns of Conflict which showed their application to ground warfare tactics. Then a briefing called Organic Design for Command and Control showing their applications to military strategy, politics and diplomacy.
The shift to greater adaptability and speed is becoming required to survive in the business world. That came to a crashing halt in A situation which leads not to a steady, linear monthly paycheck but a much bumpier income graph that looks like this. By , it was 20 years. The startup world, characterized by uncertainty, provides plenty of examples of what embracing ambiguity can lead to.
Over the past decade, we have seen a growing number of individuals and freelancers using technology to thrive in an uncertain world. That is up from 33, in , a 5. Within companies, the individuals who are most adaptable, quick and dynamic are able to add the most value. If individuals and organizations want to survive and thrive in a highly dynamic environment, they have to embrace uncertainty and novelty and learn to use it to their advantage. As examples like WhatsApp and the growth of one-person million dollar businesses show, the payoff is vitality and growth, the opportunity to shape and adapt to an ever changing reality and influence the ideas and actions of others.
Download it as a beautiful PDF to read later! Boyd created the OODA loop to try and condense his four decades of research and thinking into a single diagram that answered this question. This view of the OODA loop captures the essence. We will gradually adjust to get more precise. The OODA loop is often seen as a decision making model, but can be more accurately described as a model of individual and organization learning and adaptation.
It includes all the dimensions of that environment: the physical, mental, and moral dimensions. Imagine you were a perceptive financial trader that understood the OODA loop in the run-up to the financial collapse. In the observation phase, you saw that the market was on its way towards record-highs.
You felt the mental dimension. You saw there was a huge increase in financial instruments including mortgage-backed derivatives. You saw that many of the people who were taking out mortgages had much lower incomes than people taking out mortgages five years earlier. Orientation is the most important part of the OODA loop. It includes understanding your genetics, cultural heritage and previous experiences, then analyzing and synthesizing that with all the observations you made.
The goal of the orientation phase is to find mismatches: errors in your previous judgement or in the judgement of others. As a general rule, bad news is the best kind because as long as you catch it in time, you can turn it to your advantage. Continuing with your financial trader example, you oriented and suspected there was no way all these people were going to pay off their mortgages.
Many of them were lower income individuals with unsteady jobs.
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